Nausea waning, at 14.5 weeks

Finally! I no longer feel hideous 24/7!!! I'm still throwing up every day or so (oh yes, water is sooo intolerable - stupid tummy), but I can stand straight for a few seconds at a time now, and I made soup ... I was IN THE KITCHEN!!! ... last night and the night before! Woo-hoo! HG is going DOWN baby!!!

Waterslides

When it's hot the whole town goes to the swimming pool
When it's not the whole town stays inside
Walk past the way memorial
Towards the waterslide.




I hope I always remember the first time Ella went down the waterslide all by herself.

----

OH, and yesterday I taught Tali to abseil off the balcony in our carport!!

VISITORS ON THE WAY!!

Such beautiful weather. The birds are singing outside (actually the birds are corellas and considered pests but they sound much prettier than traffic noise would in the city), the sky is a deep blue, the sun is shining, the house is (phew) reasonably tidy.

Oh, and the beer fridge is overflowing.

It's going to be a fun weekend. We're going out to see Mt Hope and maybe show the visitors the full Murray. It really is mighty when it's like this. And I'm cranking up the outside wood pizza oven too. Very good news.

Hooray!!

Proven by science!

Today we proved conclusively that South Australia has the most delicious gingernuts, as voted by 6/9 of our testers. I didn't even know they varied by state until one of the many Queenslanders in the office told me. We designed a mostly-double-blind* testing protocol and ranked them from best to worst.

* It's hard to truly double blind this one when one of our testers is addicted to specially imported Queensland gingernuts..

Here are my tasting notes:

Qld - too soft, but a good level of gingeryness. Not a satisfying crunch. 3/10
NSW - hard. Really hard. Kinda too sweet. 5/10
Vic - Spicy. Not too sweet. Not as crunchy as NSW but still good. 7/10
SA - a good balance of hardness and spicyness. Not overly sweet. 8/10

ky is pronounced 'q' and means yellow belt :-)

Summer

Ella did a proper handstand tonight that went for a full 3 or 4 seconds!!! And she learnt how to do a full 360 flip on the monkey bars.

Man - I'm just astounded at how much of a difference all this sunlight has made - that there's suddenly so much light left after dinner that you just HAVE to go down the back and kick balls around and roll in the grass for a while. I feel like I've been indoors huddled around the fireplace for a million years and suddenly SUMMER!

(ok, spring time. But it's really nice here. You'd love it. You should come and visit.)

trying something just cos someone you like likes to do it

So dancing is a lot of fun, and it seems to be an important part of my life, the way basketball, tennis, climbing, skiing, doing a PhD and being in bands have all been. But when I dance, I dance with people I know from dancing. Only rarely can I dance with a friend, someone I already know. Elisabeth and Linda are two marvellous examples of this. So I was chatting with one of my favourite people in the world the other day, when, completely unprompted, I received the following shiny message:

I'll come dancing with you in melbourne, but you have to understand I do it under sufferance
[me: if you do it, you get massive brownie points!]
you can make me do it but you can't make me enjoy it. ok you can make me enjoy but you can't make me want to enjoy it. ok, you can make me want to enjoy it but i'd find it weird.

Man, I feel so loved! This totally made my day! The only sad part is that I want my other favourite person to say the same thing...